So the husband and I started Nutrition Boot Camp recently at Saint Mary’s Fitness Center. I personally am super excited about it, mainly because we are finally on the same path at the same time, working toward the same goal. Because everybody knows, healthy eating is a hell of a lot easier when your husband is actually doing it with you.

Most people who know me know I eat pretty healthy. I am pretty savvy when it comes to nutrition but I have a tendency to let the meal plans fall by the wayside when my husband comes home with a wheel of brie and a bottle of wine. Thai food, sushi and our weekly Mexican fiesta night also don’t help – especially after a 10 or 11 hour work day.

We throw away more perishable food than I care to admit, simply because we’re lazy. I start every week with the best of intentions but we get so busy and Dustin offers to pick up dinner on his way home (and the kids are far more inclined to pricey takeout than cooking and doing dishes) so I say yes and ask him to try and get something relatively healthy. I admit, we’re definitely not eating garbage (Campo, nigiri, Napa Sonoma are usuals for us), but we’re spending a boatload of money and ingesting way more calories than we normally would if we just cooked instead. The worst part is that we’re both really good cooks.

So, as I said…I’m super excited. So is he.

There are 10 of us in the group, which is lead by Elise Mische, a Registered (RD) and Licensed Dietician (LD). We’re a varied bunch: Three married couples including Dustin and me (us in our 30s, another couple in their mid-40s and the last in their 50s), along with four others; three women and one man. We range in age from early 30s to early 60s, and in fitness levels, from working out six-days-per-weekers to me, who hasn’t worked out in almost a month because I’ve had the cold from hell. We meet every Monday at 5:30 p.m. for an hour and learn something new each time. Today we went over the importance of meal planning and cooking efficiently so as to save time, money and effort, as well as the importance of eating breakfast. We talked about things like “Cook One, Eat Twice,” which is preparing additional servings of a main ingredient so you can use it in another meal the following day (e.g. preparing extra chicken so you can have chicken tacos tonight and Southwest chicken salad tomorrow), which is something I swear by. We also talked about the miracle of the Crock Pot, which I have yet to discover because I suck as using Crock Pots and therefore do not own one.

Each week we have a new goal surrounding a new topic. This week, our goal is to eat breakfast every day, writing each day’s meal down as we go so we can review our consumption next week. Elise will be checking in with us via email throughout the week.

I like that we’re easing into things. There was no “Go clean out the fridge and buy all new food.” It was nice. Not too extreme; no crazy limitations; just a focus on education. Education that is concentrated on how to eat balanced meals, how your body reacts to food and how to be realistically healthy. In a few weeks we’ll go on a field trip to the grocery store and in the end, we’ll all go out to dinner together, which should be interesting.

We’re going to blog as we go on our six-week journey, so you can all stay tuned to hear about our ups and downs (maybe riding that cheese wheel downhill every now and then) and how it all turns out. Most importantly, I’m really excited to see if I’m more successful now that my husband and I are on the same team. We tend to kick some serious ass when we work together.

Some of our goals are:

To not eat out so much (I’m also going to try and track how much money we save)

To maintain consistency in eating (whether it’s Dustin eating more than two meals per day or me eating more equal meals throughout the day, i.e. being good all day, then having the biggest dinner of all time)

To consume less alcohol (because we all know that alcohol is empty calories)

To teach our kids better eating habits by eating out less (and also teach them to have realistic expectations when they reach the real world because they will NEVER be able to afford to eat that well in college!)

About Betsy McDonald

Betsy McDonald is a soon-to-be wife and stepmother to two teenagers, ages 16 and 14, both of whom are taller than she. She spends her days doing PR, marketing and event planning, and her nights boxing, dancing and attempting a variety of unorthodox work outs that require a little more balance than she actually possesses. In the meantime, she spends plenty of time at Lake Tahoe and is working on perfecting the lacrosse mom persona, golfing, attempting SUP yoga, remodeling a home with her fiancé, planning her wedding, and maintaining the overall health, wealth and happiness of her newly found family. As a child growing up in Nebraska, Betsy’s dad would travel to Lake Tahoe to ski, bringing home pennant flags, T-shirts and a variety of other Reno-Tahoe-related paraphernalia. This prompted her to desire to find out just what “the Biggest Little City in the World” actually meant. By chance, she would end up here thanks to a job transfer to Gardnerville for her mom and the Millennium Scholarship. As a 14-year resident of the Biggest Little City, she’s proud to live and love in Reno. Betsy is an athlete, a writer and a cancer survivor – and hopefully an amazing stepmom. Stay tuned….

Reno Moms Blog is a community blog run by moms who live right here in the Biggest Little City and surrounding areas. We share information about what's going on in Reno and events that local moms may be interested in.